The aim of this paper is to illuminate the multilayered character of a classroom as a social interactional time-space by paying close attention to students' metapragmatic language use. To do so, this paper first reviews various important perspectives derived from various approaches to classroom discourse, and presents the theoretical and analytical frameworks befit to the current study. Then, the article moves on to provide a case study of an "English conversation" lesson at a public high school in Saitama, Japan. Fully considering students' denotationally explicit "in-group" interactions that focus on identities, power relations, and what is happening in the classroom, the paper identifies two I-R-E sequences which appear to be occurring in different dimensions even though they partly share the same denotational text. By doing so, the paper empirically points to the fact that two different frames which are irreducible to one another are simultaneously "in play", and that different pragmatic meanings are thereby created in a multilayered fashion.

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This paper analyzes a television news report of the suspension of fishing operations conducted throughout Japan in July 2008, and seeks to clarify how interpretive frameworks are constructed by the news discourse. Using critical discourse analysis as an analytical method, it examines elements of the news discourse such as the selection of information, rhetorical features, lexical items, syntax, telops and visual elements, in order to expose how these elements construct specific interpretive frameworks. The analysis revealed that although the news item is about the fishermen's strike designed to make people aware of their plight, it constructs, utilizing various discourse elements, interpretive frameworks based on market, retailer and consumer viewpoints. It also showed that interpretive frameworks produced by news discourse can be elucidated by examining the following points: 1) attributes attached to participants of events, 2) aspects of the events placed importance on, and 3) causal relationships formed in the events.

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